Cinemorphosis

Tag: god

  • The Camel, the Needle, and the Man Who Had Too Much

    The Camel, the Needle, and the Man Who Had Too Much

    I like to be financially comfortable—let’s not lie. I like having gravy money: the kind you drizzle over an already-satisfying existence just to make it rich, indulgent, and entirely unnecessary. A decadent dinner, a silly watch, a rare Japanese radio I’ll only use twice—it’s not about need. It’s about comfort laced with a whiff of thrill. But every time I partake, I’m haunted by that grim little proverb: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

    The older I get, the more I suspect that money is only part of the problem. The real barrier to heaven isn’t wealth—it’s pleasure. Or more precisely, the addiction to pleasure. Call it spiritual insulin resistance: too much sweetness, too often, until nothing satisfies and everything corrupts.

    A more accurate update to the proverb might be: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a pleasured man to get into heaven.

    By “pleasured,” I mean a man gorged on delight—hedonistic, unrestrained, swimming in his own self-curated fantasies. A man whose moral compass has rusted from disuse. And when I think of that kind of dissipation, I’m haunted by a story one of my students told me in the early ’90s—an unforgettable parable dressed up as a locker room anecdote.

    This student was a soccer player who spent a season with a club team in Italy. One of his teammates, an American, was almost offensively beautiful: tall, tan, muscular, with a jawline that could slice through marble and hair that obeyed no gravity. When the season ended, he refused to return home. He stayed. He found a nude beach. He became, in every sense of the word, The Stallion.

    Locals called him that without irony. He strutted the shoreline like a marble statue sprung to life. Women adored him, men envied him, and he lived the fantasy to its fullest: a gigolo in linen pants and nothing else. At first, it was all sun-kissed pleasure and consequence-free sex. But then came the rot.

    Somewhere along the way, he crossed an invisible line. He stopped caring about the actual act of intimacy. His addiction mutated. It was no longer about pleasure—it was about being desired. He would stand in clubs in a sheer white shirt, unbuttoned to the naval, chest gleaming, waiting for women to approach. When they did, he would reject them. The proposal was enough. The look in their eyes? That was his fix.

    Eventually, he went mad. His personality fractured like overused glass. When my student returned to Italy months later, he found The Stallion pacing the same beach—sun-kissed, glistening, and vacant. He didn’t recognize his former teammate. He walked past him with a thousand-mile stare, a ghost trapped in flesh, wandering his personal Eden turned hellscape. The pleasure that once adorned his life had hollowed it out from the inside.

    He had reached The Point of No Return.

    And every time I reach for a little unnecessary luxury—something shiny, excessive, self-soothing—I think of him. The Stallion. Proof that there’s such a thing as too much beauty, too much indulgence, too much affirmation. He wasn’t rich. But he was pleasured. And that might be even more dangerous.

  • The Gospel According to Dad: A Parable of Rocks, Regret, and Cabernet

    The Gospel According to Dad: A Parable of Rocks, Regret, and Cabernet

    I was sixteen. My parents were recently divorced. Once a month, I’d visit my father at his swanky apartment and we’d discuss my future.

    One night, my father stared at me across the dinner table, a slab of rare steak leaking its red juices into a mountain of mashed potatoes. He squinted, as if trying to determine whether I was his son or a lost philosophy major who’d wandered in from a patchouli-scented commune.

    “So,” he said, carving off a bloody corner, “what are your career plans?”

    I gave him the truth. “Not totally sure, but I’m leaning toward philosophy.”

    He dropped his knife like I’d just confessed to joining a nudist circus. “Why in the hell would you want to do a thing like that?”

    “The search for meaning,” I said.

    He snorted and chased his chew with a gulp of red wine, as if meaninglessness required lubrication. “Don’t waste your time.”

    “Meaning is a waste of time?”

    He wiped his mouth like he was preparing to deliver a TED Talk from the underworld. “Let me tell you a little story.”

    And then came one of Dad’s home-brewed parables—equal parts whiskey, cynicism, and divine apathy:

    “A young man, about your age, stood on a beach and looked up at the heavens. ‘God,’ he said, ‘help me find meaning.’ And God, being the cosmic wiseass that He is, replied, ‘Look at all the rocks around you. One of them has the meaning of life written on it. Go find it.’ The young man looked around—millions of rocks—and said, ‘But God, that’ll take forever.’ And God said, ‘That’s your problem, not mine.’”

    I already regretted everything.

    “Decades passed. The man turned over every rock. He aged like a leather shoe abandoned in the desert. No inscription. He grew sunburned, brittle, and spiritually constipated. Finally, in his nineties, he looked up at the sky, trembling with rage, and shouted, ‘God! I’ve been faithful! No pleasure, no joy, no Netflix—just rock-flipping! And I found nothing!’”

    Dad leaned in, eyes gleaming.

    “And God said: ‘That’s right, you dumb shit. Now die.’”

    There was a silence. Even the mashed potatoes seemed stunned.

    I blinked. “Where in the hell did you hear that story?”

    He leaned back, smug as a snake on a warm rock. “Made it up. For your benefit.”

    “My benefit? What am I supposed to take from this bleak little fable?”

    He ticked the lessons off like commandments: “One, God doesn’t give a shit. Two, there is no meaning. Three, stop thinking so damn much and just live your life.”

    “Easy for you to say,” I muttered. “Cruising around in your fancy car, living in your swanky bachelor pad, drinking overpriced wine.”

    “Worry not, my son,” he said, swirling his cabernet like it owed him rent. “You’ll get yours someday.”

    “So you’ve found paradise?”

    He shrugged. “Far from it. But it’s got central air. And that’ll have to do.”

  • The Apostle, the Fantasist, and the Fallacy of Oversimplification

    The Apostle, the Fantasist, and the Fallacy of Oversimplification

    For decades, I was enthralled by Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity—a book that crackled with contrarian flair and gave voice to my suspicions about Paul, the man I once called the theological arsonist of early Christianity. Maccoby offered the ultimate takedown: Paul wasn’t just a problematic apostle; he was a Gentile infiltrator, a second-rate intellect with delusions of rabbinic grandeur, and the architect of a theological Frankenstein stitched together from Jewish scripture and pagan mystery cults. I ate it up.

    But after multiple re-readings and exposure to rigorous critiques—particularly Jaroslav Pelikan’s withering 1986 review in Commentary, “The Real Paul?”—I find myself sobering up from Maccoby’s intoxicating polemic. It’s dawning on me that The Mythmaker didn’t so much reveal Paul as reinforce my own biases. Maccoby flattered the part of me that wanted Paul to be the villain in Christianity’s origin story—the man who hijacked Jesus’ message and replaced it with doctrinal imperialism.

    The prose, which once struck me as prophetic, now reads as grandiose. Maccoby’s tone vacillates between scholarly and shrill, and there’s a whiff of insecurity behind the rhetorical swagger. His portrait of Paul as a self-aggrandizing opportunist is delivered with the juicy intensity of a novelist crafting an antihero, not a historian reconstructing a life. The final chapter, which connects Paul’s theology to the roots of Christian anti-Semitism, still has force—but even there, the execution leans more on indignation than historical rigor.

    Maccoby’s thesis—Paul as a failed would-be rabbi who, thwarted by his mediocrity, built a new religion in his own image—is clever, plausible in parts, and undeniably dramatic. But it’s also marred by speculative psychoanalysis and gaping holes in historical evidence. As Pelikan deftly notes, Maccoby accuses Paul of being a fantasist while committing the same literary sin: manufacturing internal motives and dramatic arcs that aren’t supported by any reliable record. Even the irony is Pauline.

    Pelikan, writing as a Christian scholar, grants that Maccoby’s critique of Paul’s legacy—particularly regarding anti-Semitism—is worthy of serious attention. And he’s right. There’s a case to be made that Pauline theology contributed to the long and bloody shadow Christianity has cast over Jewish identity. But the leap from theological critique to historical assassination is too far, too fast, and too loose with the facts.

    What Maccoby misses—or refuses to see—is Paul’s theological brilliance. In a world obsessed with glory and power, Paul offered something almost unthinkable: a God who descends rather than ascends, who chooses suffering over status, who empties himself in the service of love. Philippians 2 is not the work of a hack. It is a theological Everest. In the image of a humbled God, Paul delivers something transcendent—an inversion of divine power that has echoed through two millennia.

    No, Paul was not a mythmaker in the pejorative sense. He was, for better or worse, a visionary. Flawed, fiery, and yes, sometimes maddening—but never mediocre.

    In the end, Maccoby gives us a Paul who is more caricature than character—more villainous foil than complex man. The truth is harder to pin down, but also more interesting: Paul is neither saint nor saboteur. He is one of the most consequential minds in human history, a man whose theological imagination reshaped the contours of the divine. That kind of mind deserves more than debunking—it demands engagement, even when it provokes discomfort. 

  • The Summer of Nosebleeds

    The Summer of Nosebleeds

    In the summer of 1985, I was leaking blood from my nostrils like a second-string horror movie extra. Were the nosebleeds stress-induced? Psychosomatic? The verdict is still out. But my therapist, Dr. Groves, had a theory. He believed I needed to be exorcised—not of demons, but of belief. A staunch atheist moonlighting as a university shrink, Groves had made it his personal crusade to save me from hell—not the place, but my fear of it. My religious conversion, which had hit me like a brick to the chest six years earlier, was the parasite he hoped to dislodge.

    Groves was a rationalist to a fault—smug in the way only a chain-smoking empiricist with a beard full of Twinkie crumbs can be. He listened to my struggles with hellfire theology with a bemused look, as if I were a case study in gullibility. I tried to explain that, like Melville on Hawthorne, I could neither believe nor be at peace in my unbelief. I feared that rejecting the orthodox view of hell might be my express ticket there. Groves was unmoved. His mission? Deconvert me and install a nice, clean OS of secular humanism.

    The problem? I had a too-lively imagination—not whimsical, but operatic. Dreams, half-dreams, hallucinations, visions, and the deeply unsettling conviction that the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz was a demonic entity dispatched from the underworld to haunt me in 480p. Every year when the movie aired, I approached it with the same dread most people reserve for colonoscopies. The lion’s twitchy eyes and unsettling facial prosthetics sent me into existential spirals. As a kid, I didn’t think he looked silly. I thought he was what demons actually looked like.

    When I shared this with Groves, he leaned back in his chair, took a drag of his cigarette, and looked at me through the haze like a zoologist observing a talking panda. He’d nod, scratch his beard, and absentmindedly devour another Twinkie. The man exuded the confidence of someone who believed the universe had been definitively explained in a back issue of Scientific American.

    I told him about my panic attacks in class, my fear of women, and my dreams—recurring nightmares where the Cowardly Lion appeared not as a bumbling mascot, but as a harbinger of damnation. Sometimes I’d wake up drenched in sweat, only to discover the nightmare wasn’t over—he was still in the room. Once, I felt him sitting on the bed beside me. My blood iced over. Breathing became an extreme sport.

    Then came the dream that broke the meter. I’d been mainlining Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and You Shall Be As Gods, trying to cram his brand of secular humanism into the same mental real estate as C.S. Lewis’s tart defenses of Christianity. The dream that followed was a Kafka-meets-Freud set piece: I was sprinting across a field toward a ring of fire, symbolic, I assumed, of Frommian liberation. But before I could reach it, the Cowardly Lion materialized like a bouncer at the gates of meaning. I froze. Couldn’t scream. Couldn’t breathe. Then I “woke up” in bed and began to levitate. Yes, levitate—hovering a foot above the mattress in full cosmic ambiguity.

    When I relayed this to Groves, he suggested a buffet of medications and, more disturbingly, that perhaps I needed a girlfriend. Preferably one with therapeutic talents in bed. That was the beginning of the end for our sessions.

    Meanwhile, I was reading Twilight Zone Magazine like it was scripture. The June 1985 issue featured a story called “Jungle Eyes” and a black panther on the cover. That night, I dreamed I was walking through a Norwegian forest. Tigers approached. Instead of mauling me, they licked my face like affectionate Labradors. I woke up with a bloody nose. But instead of panicking, I let the blood flow freely onto a sheet of paper. A tiger’s face emerged from the drips. I titled it “Tiger’s Blood” and pinned it to my bulletin board.

    Only one person ever saw it: Wade Worthington, keyboardist for a punk band then called Faith No Man. He later helped form Faith No More. Wade was a connoisseur of the bizarre and saw the painting as pure artistic expression. Groves would have seen it as further proof I belonged in a padded room. I kept it to myself.

    Eventually, I dropped Groves and started seeing Dr. Moyers, a Jungian analyst and ex-Seventh-Day Adventist whose office was conveniently close to the wine shop where I worked. Moyers treated my levitation dream, tiger portrait, and nocturnal encounters with the seriousness they deserved. He even invoked Jungian synchronicity. Things were going well until he asked me to play in a sandbox—literally. He had toy soldiers and dinosaurs. I was supposed to commune with my unconscious through sandbox choreography. That’s when I walked.

    By 1987, with a Master’s degree in hand and the desire to appear employable, I decided to repress the entire Summer of Nosebleeds. No more tiger blood. No more levitating. No more Cowardly Lion exorcisms. Rationality was the currency of adult life, and I needed benefits.

    And then, decades later, Dale Allison happened. His book Encountering Mystery cracked open the vault. Reading it at age 61, married with twin teenage daughters and semi-retired in suburban Southern California, felt like receiving a long-overdue permission slip. Here was a scholar admitting that people—sane people—have visions, visitations, encounters with the divine and the infernal. Allison references both William James and David Hufford. Light and shadow. The beatific and the demonic. Finally, someone spoke my language.

    I realized I had never truly processed my four heavenly encounters, which had occurred in a tight, surreal cluster from November 1978 to March 1979. Oddly, they all preceded my Christian conversion—which, it should be noted, was motivated not by love but by fear. Specifically, fear of hell. My conversion, in hindsight, was a theological panic purchase: a desperate grab for Hell Insurance.

    The first encounter came on November 27, 1978—Moscone Night. Dan White had just assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Dianne Feinstein announced the news on live TV. I walked outside to our backyard deck and collapsed into a patio chair. That’s when a Giant Me rose from the earth—muscular, aglow, and radiating kindness. He cradled me and whispered, “Be strong. Be good.” It felt real. Too real. But also, too much like a projection. It lacked the unsettling Otherness of what came next.

    A week later, after a Peter Gabriel concert and little sleep, I awoke and saw heaven. Green. Glorious. Humbling. I whispered, “I need to be like this all the time,” and the vision faded like a tide pulling away. That day, I think I had another nosebleed.

    By February 1979, I was working at Taco Bell in Castro Valley. During a break, still wearing the too-small hat meant for smaller craniums, I felt a flood of warmth and heard a message: “Your sole purpose is to love everyone with a pure heart.” A woman at the counter later whispered to her husband, “That young man is very nice.” Little did she know I was a brooding, angry bodybuilder trying to protect a mother unraveling from divorce and bipolar disorder. What she saw was the glow.

    Then, March. Pop Lit class. A joke of a class where the teacher read pulp novels while we filled out book report forms. I was skimming The Weigher of Souls when, out of nowhere, a wave of divine peace overtook me. I said, “I’m at peace,” again and again. I walked out crying, sat in my car, stunned. I think of Pascal’s “Night of Fire.” I called mine Pop Lit.

    Four encounters. Four months. And then—nothing but the cold machinery of doctrine. My Christian conversion in April 1979 was all about HAZMAT theology: God was radioactive, and Jesus was the suit that made divine proximity survivable. Church felt like a cleanup crew at Chernobyl, urging others to put on their gear or face incineration. Penal Substitutionary Atonement, they called it. I called it spiritual trauma.

    It got worse. Church friends assured me my Jewish relatives—including those murdered in Auschwitz—were in hell. God loves you, they said, and now here’s your cup of theological cyanide. I felt gaslit by the well-meaning faithful.

    Not all Christians horrified me. That same summer, in the university library, I stumbled across Rufus Jones’s Fundamental Ends of Life. His vision of faith was neither rescue mission nor social engineering project. It was a love affair. A search for God the way a lover searches for the beloved, a saint for holiness. Jones made me weep. His God resembled the Being I’d met in those four months before the conversion machinery kicked in.

    I wish I could say I became a Quaker like Jones, but I didn’t. I remain in theological limbo. Part of me still clings to the watermelon analogy: if Christian doctrine has seeds, I don’t get to spit them out and still claim the fruit. And yet, I’ve spent sixty-plus years chasing vanity projects and spiritual junk food only to find that the real task—the only task—is what Paul describes in Philippians: becoming like Christ, not in dogma, but in descent. To serve. To empty. To love.

    Frankl says we don’t get to choose meaning; life assigns it. The question is whether we answer the call. And if that means sitting alone in the cheap seats of faith, far from the pulpit, clutching my Tiger’s Blood painting and memories of Pop Lit, then so be it. At least I still believe in the show.

  • Satan Wears Patek: The Couture Demons of Network TV

    Satan Wears Patek: The Couture Demons of Network TV

    After dinner, my wife and I collapsed onto the couch like two satiated lions, still riding the sugar high from a slice of chocolate cake so transcendent it could’ve been smuggled out of a Vatican vault. This wasn’t just dessert—it was a spiritual experience. Fudgy, rich, and topped with a ganache that whispered blasphemies in French, it left us in a state of chocolaty euphoria. And what better way to follow up divine confectionery than with a show called Evil—which, in tone and content, felt like dessert’s opposite number.

    Evil, for the uninitiated, is what happens when The X-Files and The Exorcist have a baby and then dress it in Prada. Our hero is David Acosta, a priest so genetically gifted he looks like he was sculpted during an abs day in Michelangelo’s studio. He partners with Kristen Bouchard, a forensic psychologist with both supermodel cheekbones and a Rolodex of PhDs, and Ben Shakir, a tech bro turned ghostbuster, who handles the EMF detectors and keeps the Wi-Fi strong enough to livestream from hell. Together, they investigate cases of alleged possession, miracles, and demonic mischief—all lurking, naturally, in two-story suburban homes with open-concept kitchens.

    What really juices the narrative is the will-they-won’t-they tension between Kristen and Father Abs. Their chemistry crackles with forbidden longing, as if every exorcism could end in a kiss—had David not taken a vow of celibacy (and the producers not wanted to nuke the Catholic viewership). It’s less faith versus science and more eye contact versus self-control.

    And then there’s Leland Townsend, the show’s resident demon in Dockers. He’s less Prince of Darkness and more Assistant Manager of Darkness—slick, smug, and oily enough to deep-fry a turkey. He slinks into scenes oozing unearned confidence and pathological glee, like Satan’s regional sales director. You can practically smell the Axe body spray of evil.

    Let’s pause here for fashion. The wardrobe department on Evil deserves an Emmy, a Pulitzer, and possibly a fragrance line. Everyone’s rocking cinematic outerwear that belongs in the Louvre. Kristen’s coats are so tailored they could cut glass. Acosta’s wrist is adorned with a Patek Philippe that suggests his vows may include poverty of the soul, but not of the Swiss variety. Honestly, the outfits are so distracting you half expect Satan to comment on the stitching.

    In one late-night scene, Kristen’s daughters are using ghost-detecting iPad apps at 3 a.m., their faces bathed in eerie blue light. It’s a chilling tableau of children, tech, and probable demonic activity—basically a 2024 parenting blog. Just as the show was about to unravel the mystery, my wife hit pause and delivered a horror story of her own: teachers using AI to grade papers with personalized comments. Comments so perfectly tailored they could bring a tear to a parent’s eye—and yet, no human had written them.

    “What’s the point of teachers anymore?” she asked, already knowing the answer. I nodded solemnly, watching the paused image of Father David, his coat pristine, his watch immaculate. I had neither. And I live in Los Angeles, where “winter” is defined as turning off the ceiling fan.

    But something in that moment shifted. The show wasn’t just mocking the digital devil—it was embodying him. That wristwatch mocked me. The coat judged me. I wasn’t watching Evil; I was being possessed by it. By envy, by consumer lust, by the creeping suspicion that maybe—just maybe—I wasn’t living my best, most stylized demon-fighting life.

    It’s not the show’s demons that haunt me. It’s their wardrobe.

  • The Desert Peacock: How I Dressed My Way Into Academic Probation

    The Desert Peacock: How I Dressed My Way Into Academic Probation

    Let me paint you a picture of fashion excess that even Liberace would’ve advised against. There I was, a freshly minted professor in the dusty town of Bakersfield, high on a cocktail of naïveté, unresolved teenage regrets, and the sartorial influence of the International Male and Urban Gear catalogs—an unholy trinity of misguided masculinity if there ever was one. In my 27-year-old mind, those catalogs were less about clothes and more like ancient tomes revealing the very essence of manhood. But this delusion reached a sartorial climax that finally broke the camel’s back—or in this case, shattered the patience of the English Department Chair.

    At first, my colleagues generously excused my increasingly bizarre wardrobe as “youthful exuberance” from a Bay Area transplant trying to assert some “big city” flair in a desert outpost where fashion trends arrive three decades late. But one fateful day, I pushed the boundaries beyond reason. I strutted onto campus like a peacock ready for a ballroom dance-off, dressed in tight Girbaud slacks that practically screamed, “I’m here to give a lecture, but I might also break into interpretive dance.” My feet were clad in Italian loafers, complete with tassels and tiny bells—yes, bells. Who needs socks when you’ve got bells?

    But the crown jewel of this sartorial disaster was the sage-whisper green pirate shirt. And when I say “pirate shirt,” I’m not talking about a whimsical Halloween costume. I’m talking about a translucent, billowing monstrosity that looked like it was plucked from the wardrobe of Captain Jack Sparrow after a particularly wild night of plundering. My bulging pecs were practically hosting their own TED Talk through the sheer fabric, and the effect was more Moulin Rouge than Macbeth.

    Word of my fashion blunder made it to Moses Okoro, our distinguished Chair, a no-nonsense scholar in his fifties who had traded the vibrant streets of Lagos for the dull sands of this backwater town. Moses prided himself on being a man of deep thought, the kind who savored life’s complexities and relished philosophical debates like a connoisseur of fine wine. In the rarefied circles he once frequented, he had been celebrated for his intellectual rigor, a reputation largely sustained by an essay he penned two decades earlier on a celebrated Nigerian novelist. The essay, which dissected themes of post-colonial identity with surgical precision, had been lauded as groundbreaking in its time, securing Moses’s place as a respected voice in academic and literary discussions. But the years had passed, and that once-prominent essay had become a relic—he still leaned on it like a crutch, bringing it up whenever the opportunity presented itself, hoping to rekindle the admiration it had once inspired.

    In Bakersfield, however, Moses’s brilliance was met with blank stares and indifferent nods. The dusty little town was not the place for nuanced explorations of African literature or the intricacies of global politics. The locals, with their straightforward values and pragmatic concerns, found Moses’s musings a touch too lofty, too irrelevant to their daily lives. He would hold court at dinner parties, weaving rich tapestries of thought, only to be met with distracted glances and the awkward silence of guests shifting in their seats. The wisdom he offered—hard-earned through decades of scholarship and contemplation—was like pearls cast before swine. It left him feeling both superior and isolated, like a prophet in a land of the unworthy.

    Moses’s frustration was only amplified by the success of his wife, Olivia, a writer who specialized in best-selling women’s fiction. Her books—full of romantic entanglements, gripping betrayals, and redemptive arcs—flew off the shelves. They were the kind of stories that readers devoured in a weekend, utterly hooked by her knack for creating characters who felt both relatable and dramatic. While Moses dissected literature with a scalpel, Olivia spun tales with the effortless charm of someone who understood exactly what people wanted to read. Her popularity irked him, though he would never admit it openly. She was always jetting off to glamorous book tours and literary retreats, sipping cocktails in Paris with her coterie of fellow best-sellers, while Moses stayed behind, holding the fort in Bakersfield, watching the horizon for intellectual company that never arrived.

    The contrast between them was stark. Olivia lived in a whirlwind of vibrant social engagements and glossy magazine features, while Moses felt marooned in his world of abstract ideas and unsung brilliance. He couldn’t help but feel sidelined, a minor figure in the grand narrative of her life. Though he loved her in his own way, there was a gnawing sense of exclusion, a quiet bitterness that his profound insights seemed valued less than the escapist fiction that had brought her fame and fortune. He felt like an aging lion, majestic yet irrelevant, while Olivia basked in the attention of an adoring public.

    Yet, he never confronted her about it. Moses would retreat into his study, surrounded by shelves groaning under the weight of dense academic tomes, finding solace in the solitude of his thoughts. But even in that sanctuary, there lingered the unspoken truth: the world had moved on, and he was living off the fumes of past glories while Olivia thrived in the present, leaving him behind in the dusty echoes of Bakersfield’s indifference.

    By the time I got the midday summons to his office, I knew I was about to get the fashion red card. I walked in, and there was Moses—feet ensconced in some sort of luxurious foot-warmer device, a necessary accessory for his gout. He flashed me a grin that was half-amused, half-pitying, like a man witnessing someone try to cook a steak with a hairdryer.

    “Jeff,” he began, in a tone that suggested he was both fond of me and horrified by me. “You’re a striking figure, I’ll give you that. But this—” he gestured vaguely at the shimmering monstrosity draped over my torso—“is taking things too far. I can see more than I care to.”

    I glanced down at my exposed chest and, for the first time, realized that my pecs were starring in their own soap opera under that filmy fabric. Moses continued, “I get it—a man with your bodybuilding prowess wants to flaunt it. But, Jeff, this is an academic setting, not Studio Fifty-Four. Be more of a professor and less of a Desert Peacock.”

    He then instructed me to march straight home, ditch the pirate couture, and return dressed in something befitting a person who isn’t auditioning for a Vegas show. Before I could slink away in shame, Moses added with a smile, “Jeff, I like you. You’ve got potential. But let me remind you, this town is a fishbowl. Whatever you do in the morning, the whole town knows by lunchtime.”

    That was the Bakersfield way—a place where the smallest fashion faux pas became a full-blown scandal before the sun hit noon. As I left his office, I knew that my pirate shirt days were over, along with my delusions of dressing like the love child of Captain Morgan and Don Juan.

    With a sigh, I trudged home to swap my dreams of high fashion for something a bit more… professorial.

  • If Paul Feuded with His Rival Apostles on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen

    If Paul Feuded with His Rival Apostles on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen

    Title: The Real Apostles of Jerusalem: Pentecost and Pettiness on Bravo

    [INT. Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen – The studio is lit like a Roman bathhouse crossed with a New York tiki bar. Andy Cohen sits gleaming between a grimacing Paul the Apostle, in an impeccably tailored robe with Roman stitching, and Peter, who looks like he’d rather be crucified upside-down again than share a couch with Paul. To the left, Bartholomew checks his cuticles while James the Lesser sips merlot like it’s judgment day.]

    ANDY COHEN
    Welcome back to Watch What Happens Live! We are blessed tonight—literally. It’s an apostolic showdown, honey. On my left, we have Peter, James, John, and the boys from Galilee. And to my right, the man who insists he’s also a real apostle—Paul of Tarsus!

    PAUL (tight smile)
    I’m not just a real apostle, Andy. I’m the apostle to the Gentiles. I practically invented the church. And yet I’m never invited to the literary salons in Antioch, never quoted at theology brunches. I wrote thirteen letters—some of which people still read. Unlike certain fishermen whose only contribution was foot-in-mouth disease.

    PETER (fuming)
    Oh give me a break, Saul—I mean Paul. You show up years after the resurrection, claim you saw a “light,” and suddenly you’re the CEO of Jesus, Inc.? The rest of us actually knew the man. We walked with Him. We ate with Him. We heard Him snore. You had a seizure on a donkey and decided you’re the oracle of salvation.

    JAMES THE LESSER (leaning in)
    Let’s be real. If Paul had a PR team any better, he’d be trending on Messianic TikTok. The man has a scroll drop every month. “To the Galatians,” “To the Ephesians,” “To My Haters.” Please.

    ANDY COHEN
    Wow, okay! So Peter, what’s your biggest gripe with Paul?

    PETER
    He’s always subtweeting us in his epistles! “Even if an angel preaches a different gospel, let him be accursed.” Oh gee, I wonder who he meant. Then he throws in a “those who seemed to be something meant nothing to me.” That’s me, Andy! He means me! I was the rock! Now I’m a footnote?

    JOHN (muttering)
    I wrote a whole gospel and he still called me “pillar adjacent.”

    PAUL (exploding)
    You accuse me of ambition, but I suffered for this calling. I was shipwrecked! Imprisoned! Bitten by snakes! You lot had fish and loaves—I had near-death experiences and unpaid missionary tours! If I boast, I boast in the Lord. And maybe also a little in my rhetorical genius.

    BARTHOLOMEW (finally speaking)
    He called himself the least of the apostles and then made himself the brand.

    PAUL
    The Spirit speaks through me!

    PETER
    The Spirit told you to call me a hypocrite in front of the Galatians?

    PAUL
    If the sandal fits.

    ANDY COHEN (grinning like a man feeding Christians to lions)
    Oof! Okay, we are flaming tonight—like the bush, not the brunch. Final thoughts? Can we bury the hatchet like it’s buried at Golgotha?

    PETER (snatching his wine glass)
    Sure. I’ll bury it right here.

    Peter hurls the wine in Paul’s face. The studio erupts. Paul stands, soaked and fuming, quoting 2 Corinthians about his sufferings while John rolls his eyes and checks his scroll for quotes about loving one another.

    ANDY COHEN (gleeful)
    Okay, that’s the gospel according to Bravo! Next week: Mary Magdalene claps back at Judas in The Real Disciples: Women Tell All! Goodnight, everybody!

    [Cue the theme song: “Turn the Other Cheek (Remix)” by DJ Pontius Pilate.]

  • Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? Elaine Pagels and the Search for a Transformative Truth

    Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? Elaine Pagels and the Search for a Transformative Truth

    In Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus, Elaine Pagels—now in her eighties—recounts her lifelong obsession with the figure of Jesus, not as a doctrine, but as a presence: a message of love and transformation in a world saturated with darkness. From a young age, she noticed a glaring contradiction. The Jesus of her local Methodist church was soft-edged and suburban, tailored to soothe middle-class anxieties. Meanwhile, the Catholic church she visited with a friend introduced her to a far more shadowy vision—one where sin reigned, and a priest, cloaked in mystery, handed out judgment like grades on a cosmic report card.

    Hungry for something real, she threw herself into faith. She attended a Billy Graham “Crusade for Christ” at Candlestick Park and, in a moment of tearful surrender, accepted Jesus as her savior and joined an evangelical church. But the honeymoon didn’t last. When her Jewish friend died in a car accident, she turned to her church community in anguish—only to be met with a chilling theological shrug. Was he saved? they asked. When she answered no, they calmly consigned him to hell. That moment of smug certainty shattered something in her. She walked away from the church—and never looked back.

    But the ache didn’t go away. Instead, it deepened into a lifelong question: Why did the story of Jesus strike me so deeply? Was it about Jesus himself? Or was it something broader—something in the architecture of religious experience that opened people up to realities they couldn’t explain?

    That question led her to Harvard’s Study of Religion, where she discovered a Christianity far more fractured, contested, and diverse than the one she’d been taught. The four canonical gospels were only a sliver of the story. Written decades after Jesus’ death, by authors who retrofitted their names to evoke apostolic authority, these texts were shaped by literary tropes and cultural myths of the Greco-Roman world. Beyond them were the apocryphal books and the Gnostic gospels, each offering competing visions of who Jesus was. Even after Constantine made Christianity the state religion and tried to enforce orthodoxy, believers couldn’t agree on what “true” Christianity actually meant.

    Still, Pagels returns to the core question: What kind of person was Jesus? Why did he endure when gods like Zeus faded into mythology? Why are there so many versions of him—prophet, rebel, savior, mystic, divine son?

    As she peels back the layers of history and doctrine, Pagels isn’t looking for the “correct” Jesus. She’s looking for the one that moved her, the one that cracked open the world with possibility. And in this, her search feels less like an academic pursuit and more like a human longing—to believe that, in spite of the noise and contradiction, there is still something true at the heart of the story.

    Like the old game show To Tell the Truth, we’re all watching the contestants declare, “I am Jesus.” And the question still echoes: Will the real Jesus please stand up?

    ***

    As usual, Pagels’ book is engaging. As I read about Matthew and Luke’s different accounts of the virgin birth and church people blithely telling Pagels that her Jewish friend is in hell, it occurs to me that I despise piety; but moral debauchery and smug nihilism are just as odious. 

  • The Great American Fashion Mistake

    The Great American Fashion Mistake

    The breeding ground for writing my many unreadable novels was the California desert, where my catastrophic literary judgment was rivaled only by my crimes against fashion. Allow me to paint you a picture of excess so garish that even Liberace would have staged an intervention.

    There I was—a freshly minted full-time professor in a sun-scorched town, drunk on a heady cocktail of naïveté, unresolved teenage angst, and the disastrous influence of International Male and Urban Gear catalogs. To my 27-year-old mind, these catalogs weren’t mere collections of overpriced polyester; they were sacred texts, blueprints for the modern alpha male—or at least a man who looked like he managed a European nightclub and occasionally fled the country under mysterious circumstances.

    But even my delusions had their breaking point. The pinnacle of my sartorial madness arrived in one final, glorious misstep—an outfit so egregious that it shattered the patience of my English Department Chair, a man whose tolerance, until that moment, had been almost biblical.

    At first, my colleagues generously excused my increasingly bizarre wardrobe as “youthful exuberance” from a Bay Area transplant trying to assert some “big city” flair in a desert outpost where fashion trends arrive three decades late. But one fateful day, I pushed the boundaries beyond reason. I strutted into the campus like a peacock ready for a ballroom dance-off, dressed in tight Girbaud slacks that practically screamed, “I’m here to give a lecture, but I might also break into interpretive dance.” My feet were clad in Italian loafers, complete with tassels and tiny bells—yes, bells. Who needs socks when you’ve got bells? 

    But the crown jewel of this sartorial disaster—was the sage-whisper green pirate shirt. And when I say “pirate shirt,” I’m not talking about a whimsical Halloween costume. I’m talking about a translucent, billowing monstrosity that looked like it was plucked from the wardrobe of Captain Jack Sparrow after a particularly wild night of plundering. My bulging pecs were practically hosting their own TED Talk through the sheer fabric, and the effect was more Moulin Rouge than Macbeth.

    Word of my fashion blunder made it to Moses Okoro, our distinguished Chair, a no-nonsense scholar in his fifties who had traded the vibrant streets of Lagos for the dull sands of this backwater town. Moses prided himself on being a man of deep thought, the kind who savored life’s complexities and relished philosophical debates like a connoisseur of fine wine. In the rarefied circles he once frequented, he had been celebrated for his intellectual rigor, a reputation largely sustained by an essay he penned two decades earlier on a celebrated Nigerian novelist. The essay, which dissected themes of post-colonial identity with surgical precision, had been lauded as groundbreaking in its time, securing Moses’s place as a respected voice in academic and literary discussions. But the years had passed, and that once-prominent essay had become a relic—he still leaned on it like a crutch, bringing it up whenever the opportunity presented itself, hoping to rekindle the admiration it had once inspired. 

    By the time I got the midday summons to his office, I knew I was about to get the fashion red card. I walked in, and there was Moses—feet ensconced in some sort of luxurious foot-warmer device, a necessary accessory for his gout. He flashed me a grin that was half-amused, half-pitying like a man witnessing someone try to cook a steak with a hairdryer.

    “Jeff,” he began, in a tone that suggested he was both fond of me and horrified by me. “You’re a striking figure, I’ll give you that. But this—” he gestured vaguely at the shimmering monstrosity draped over my torso—“is taking things too far. I can see more than I care to.” 

    I glanced down at my exposed chest and, for the first time, realized that my pecs were starring in their own soap opera under that filmy fabric. Moses continued, “I get it—a man with your bodybuilding prowess wants to flaunt it. But, Jeff, this is an academic setting, not Studio Fifty-Four. Be more of a professor and less of a Desert Peacock.”

    He then instructed me to march straight home, ditch the pirate couture, and return dressed in something befitting a person who isn’t auditioning for a Vegas show. Before I could slink away in shame, Moses added with a smile, “Jeff, I like you. You’ve got potential. But let me remind you, this town is a fishbowl. Whatever you do in the morning, the whole town knows by lunchtime.”

    That was the small-town way—a place where the smallest fashion faux pas became a full-blown scandal before the sun hit noon. As I left his office, I knew that my pirate shirt days were over, along with my delusions of dressing like the love child of Captain Morgan and Don Juan.

    With a sigh, I trudged home to swap my dreams of high fashion for something a bit more… professorial.

    ***

    I had no clue back then, but my tragic fashion choices as a young professor in the desert in the early ‘90s were the desperate impulses of a kid who’d missed his shot at feeling special and was clawing to reclaim a glory he’d fumbled away when he was a teenage bodybuilder. 

    As a recovering writing addict, I feel duty-bound to interrogate the roots of my affliction. I suspect my obsession with literary fame was a desperate attempt to fill the void left by a glory that always felt just out of reach. Surely, if I could be famous, I’d finally be whole. The restless gnawing inside me would stop.

    This fantasy—this belief that success would grant me some grand, existential healing—must be the defining delusion of Manuscriptus Rex, the pitiful beast I have become. Like Linus in the pumpkin patch, I waited, not for the Great Pumpkin, but for the Great American Novel to descend and bless me with meaning.

    I convinced myself that basking in literary fame would erase the sting of a squandered youth, a time when I was too clueless, too underdeveloped, too timid to seize life with the lust and gusto it demanded. That lost youth left a wound, and Manuscriptus Rex clung to the belief that writing—great writing—would be the magic salve. If I couldn’t reclaim my past, I could at least immortalize myself on the page.

    It was a beautiful, seductive lie.

    Flashback to 1981: I was working a job loading parcels at UPS in Oakland, on a low-carb diet that shredded me down to the bone. I was this close to contending for the Mr. Teenage San Francisco title. With a perfectly bronzed 180-pound frame, my clothes started hanging off me like a bad costume. That meant one thing: new wardrobe. Enter a fitting room at a Pleasanton mall, where I was trying on pants behind gauzy curtains when I overheard two attractive young women debating who should ask me out. Their voices escalated, full of hunger and competition, as if I was the last slice of pizza at a frat party. I pictured them throwing down on the store carpet, pulling hair and clawing at each other’s throats, all for the privilege of walking out with the human trophy that was me.

    It was the golden moment I’d always dreamed of, my chance to bask in the attention and seize my shot at feeling like a demigod. So, what did I do? I froze like a deer in headlights, slapping on a look of such exaggerated indifference it was like laying out a welcome mat that said “Stay Away.” They took one look at my aloof facade and staggered off, probably mumbling about how stuck-up I seemed. But here’s the truth: I wasn’t a man full of myself—I was a coward hiding behind muscle armor.

    For a short, fleeting period—from my mid-teens to early twenties—I was the kind of guy who could’ve sent Cosmopolitan’s “Bachelor of the Month” candidates sobbing into their pillows. But my personality was still crawling in the shallow end of the pool while my body was busy competing for gold medals. I had sculpted a physique that would make Greek gods nod in approval, but socially? I was like a houseplant that wilts if you talk too loudly. Gorgeous women practically threw themselves at me, and I responded with the warmth and enthusiasm of a mannequin. Behind all that bronzed, chiseled muscle was a scared little boy trapped in a fortress of self-doubt.

    The frustration that consumed me as I stood there, watching those two retail employees squabble over me, was the same frustration that hit me like a truck a week later at the contest. I entered Mr. Teenage San Francisco as a “natural”—which is just a polite way of saying I didn’t juice and therefore shrank down to a point where I looked more like a wiry special-ops recruit than a bodybuilder. At six feet and 180 pounds, I had the lean, aesthetic “Frank Zane Look” just well enough to snag runner-up. But the guy who beat me was a golden-haired meathead pumped full of steroids and Medjool dates, which gave him muscles that looked inflated by a bike pump and a gut that seemed ready to explode from cramping. 

    The day after the contest, I was laid out at home, basking in the almost-victory and recovering from the Herculean effort of flexing through a nightmare lineup. Then the calls started pouring in. Strangers who’d gotten my number from the contest registry wanted me to model for their sketchy fitness magazines. Some sounded more like basement-dwelling creeps than actual photographers. I turned them down with all the enthusiasm of a nightclub bouncer dealing with fake IDs. But then one call stood out—a woman claiming to be an art student from UCSF, asking me to pose for her portfolio. Tempting, sure, but I politely declined. 

    Why? The reasons were as predictable as they were pathetic. First, I was drained from cutting down to 180 pounds and just wanted to curl up in a hole. Second, I was lazy. The thought of expending energy to meet a stranger sounded about as fun as a root canal. But the main reason? I was a professional neurotic, a certified worrywart who avoided human interaction like it was an airborne disease. The idea of meeting this mysterious woman in a San Francisco coffee shop filled me with a dread so profound that I felt like a cat eyeing a room full of rocking chairs.

    By turning down those offers, I was throwing away the golden advice handed down in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder. According to the Gospel of Arnold, I should’ve been leveraging my physique into acting gigs, business ventures, and political fame. But here’s the thing—I didn’t have Arnold’s larger-than-life charisma, his zest for adventure, or his overpowering drive to turn everything into a money-making opportunity. While Arnold was out charming Hollywood and turning flexing into fortune, I was content to crawl under a rock and avoid all forms of adventure and new connections. If there had been a way to market my body without ever leaving my room, I would’ve been the undisputed king of the fitness world.

    Instead, I took a different path—one paved with introversion and leading straight to a career as a college writing instructor in a backwater desert town. By the time I hit twenty-seven, I was finally catching up socially—just in time to fantasize about all the chances I’d blown. Strutting around the desert in flamboyant outfits like a peacock trying to reclaim lost glory, I was determined to make up for all the opportunities I’d wasted, finally embracing the ridiculousness of who I’d become.

  • FOMO and Lot’s Wife

    FOMO and Lot’s Wife

    Lot’s wife was the Patron Saint of People Who Can’t Move On. Fixated on the past, she suffered one of the most poetically savage fates in the Bible—all because she couldn’t resist one last look.

    Here’s the setup:

    God, having had enough of Sodom and Gomorrah’s apocalyptic-level depravity, decided to do a little urban renewal via fire and brimstone. Before flattening the twin cities of sin, He sent two angels to warn Lot—one of the few decent guys left—to grab his family and run for the hills.

    The angels gave one very clear, non-negotiable instruction:

    “Run for your lives. Don’t stop. Don’t look back.”

    Lot, his wife, and their daughters bolted. But somewhere along the escape route, Lot’s wife just had to turn around—whether out of nostalgia, defiance, or sheer, irresistible FOMO.

    And in that instant, she was turned into a human salt lick.

    No warning. No second chances. Just instantaneous, irreversible transformation into a monument of bad decision-making.

    The Bible doesn’t spell out exactly why she got the sodium chloride special, but theories abound:

    1. FOMO: The Most Fatal Flavor – Maybe she wasn’t just looking back—maybe she was longing for what she was leaving behind. If she couldn’t let go of the past, she was doomed to be frozen in it.
    2. Disobedience Gets You Petrified – The angels didn’t offer wiggle room in their warning. No fine print. No loopholes. She broke the one rule, and divine judgment hit like a lightning bolt wrapped in a salt shaker.
    3. The Ultimate Symbol of Being Stuck – Salt, in biblical times, was a symbol of barrenness and desolation. Her punishment could represent what happens when you refuse to move forward—you end up a relic, a cautionary tale, a roadside curiosity for future travelers.

    Whether she was mourning her house, her friends, or the top-tier Sodom brunch scene, Lot’s wife represents everyone who has ever been emotionally imprisoned by the past.

    I get it.

    As a former bodybuilder and Boomer who cut his teeth in the 70s, I have spent more time than I care to admit wallowing in the golden glow of a decade I will never return to. I see the world through a haze of disco ball reflections, Angel Flight bell-bottoms, puka shells, coconut-scented tanning oil, and Love Boat reruns.

    Nostalgia is a drug. It arrests us emotionally, tricks us into believing that the best version of ourselves already happened, and feeds us visions of glory we probably never even had.

    Lot’s wife? She’s the ultimate warning against romanticizing the past. She didn’t just look back—she got stuck there.

    And if we’re not careful, we’ll be right there with her, frozen in time, while the world moves on without us.